Feature Category: Interviews

Walter Hill’s 1979 The Warriors is rightly revered as one of the biggest cult classic movies of all time. And as the film edges ever closer to its 40th anniversary, the remaining cast members are heading to Edgbaston Stadium, Birmingham for a special UK Conclave event on April 1st and 2nd. Ahead of that event, we were lucky enough to grab some time with Michael Beck, who played Swan in Hill’s iconic movie, to discuss working on The Warriors, the film’s legacy and status as a cult classic, how that affected his career, and a whole host more.

STARBURST: First and foremost, your involvement in The Warriors. One of the stories out there is that the interest from Walter Hill in yourself came from him seeing you in Madman. Was that indeed the case, and did they reach out to you directly or did you have to audition?

Michael Beck: Well what actually happened, I was in New York working as an actor at that point. My agents were like anyone my age in New York at that time, trying to submit me to the casting agents for The Warriors. I had trained at the Central School in London then worked for a subsequent couple of years in theatre over there. So they knew me, the casting agents for this particular film knew me, they had cast me in some Broadway stuff, and they knew me as a classically trained stage actor. They made the determination that I couldn’t play a New York street guy, so they would not allow me to be seen. So had Walter not seen Madman to see Sigourney Weaver – that was her first film – for Alien, I probably would not have been seen for it. What happened, once he had seen that he contacted the casting agents and said, “Why has this guy Michael Beck not been submitted? I wanna see him!” So they then submitted me and I went in and met with Walter and Larry Gordon, the producer, and I think Frank Marshall was there also in the meeting. I read a scene for them and they called my agent within half an hour of my leaving the place and said that I had the role.

Was there any talk at all of you being considered for any other roles in the film, or was it always Swan that was in mind?

Yeah, I think it was always Swan. He had seen that picture, Madman, and I guess he saw something in that performance that let him know that I was right for the role of Swan.

Were you aware of Sol Yurick’s original Warriors novel at that point or did that come later on?

No, once I was cast I found out that the screenplay had been based upon a novel. I read the novel, as did probably everyone in the cast, and the novel had very little, but some, to do with how Walter adapted that to the screen.

There’s various stories over the decades about how certain things were in the original screenplay but ultimately taken out completely or cut from the final film. How different do you remember the movie itself being from what you were first given as a script?

There were some major storyline differences. Probably the most major storyline difference was that in the original script Fox ends up with Mercy, and Swan had a different kind of arc but still ends up back at Coney Island and reunites with the boys at Coney Island. He’s captured by a rival gang, he escapes from them, and he gets back to Coney with the boys for the final confrontation on the beach. So that’s a major storyline change, that Swan ended up with Mercy and Fox ends up being killed in the subway. That was very different from the original script. And just other things, scenes that were deleted. There was an intro section to the beginning of the movie. I remember Walter telling me when we were filming it that he patterned it on Kurozawa’s Seven Samurai movie. That’s how he was introducing each of these Warriors characters. That was all done in daylight at our headquarters down at Coney. I think, as I remember how he explained it to us, towards the end of the shoot he said how he’d scrapped all that, and he just shot these little scenes to pop in at the beginning of the movie; Cleon talking to someone; Swan talking to Rembrandt; all of these little exchanges as the train is moving towards The Bronx for the conclave. He felt that once they started editing the movie he said, “This movie needs to all happen at night, expect for the final confrontation. That’s the only time it should be daylight.” So that’s really why he scrapped that beginning sequence. Other than that, pretty much it’s scene-for-scene. I’m sure I’m forgetting maybe some small scene here or there, but everything else is as pretty much per the original script that I saw.

 

Supposedly you guys had to go through a stunt camp before the shoot because of the physicality involved. How much of an intense production was it for you?

It was a very intense shoot. I’ve heard Walter say in interviews before that when he was casting this movie, when he and Larry Gordon were casting it, not only did they look at actors to determine whether they were capable of playing the part, but they looked at their physicality because they knew it was going to be a rigorous shoot, that we were going to be running every night, that we were going to be doing stunt fights, etc. So you needed to cast people who were capable of not only doing all of that physical stuff but being able to maintain doing all of that stuff through an 80-night shoot. They had that in mind, and yes, it was intense. But we were all young, and we were all in much better shape by the end of the movie than we were at the beginning. And Craig Baxley, the stunt coordinator, he came about 2 weeks prior to shooting. I think he met with us probably 3 to 5 times in a 10-day period before we started principal photography, just going through basics; how to throw a punch so the camera can read it, how to take a punch, how to fall, all of that stuff. I would say we did 98% of our own stuff. When Vermin gets thrown into the mirror in the bathroom fight, a stunt double actually went into the mirror not Terry Michos. Other than that, I can’t remember anything we didn’t do ourselves. We were young, starting-out actors so there was no insurance problems with us. It wasn’t like having Tom Cruise and people screaming “Oh no, he can’t do that!”… although he does his own stuff either way.

For the upcoming Birmingham event here in the UK, you’re bringing over near-enough all of the surviving cast and crew. Having been to so many of these events over the years, there must be a huge bond there between you guys. When the movie was being shot, was that bond pretty instant or did it take a little while to build up a chemistry and rapport with each other?

It seems in retrospect that it was fairly instantaneous. For all of us, I would say within the first week to 10 days of shooting, that pecking order had been established – which was kind of the pecking order of the gang. It was kind of like life imitating art, not the reverse. It was really interesting how we did bond over the period of that shoot and how that has maintained through almost 40 years. I mean, Deborah Van Valkenburgh (The Warriors’ Mercy) through the years has come to Thanksgivings and Christmases at my house. David Harris (The Warriors’ Cochise) introduced me to my wife and is a Godfather to one of my children. Which is rare in film and television! You meet a lot of people, you have intense relationships during the shooting, sometimes you maintain relationships with them during your life but not often, not like this. This is quite extraordinary, and for me the most valuable and meaningful thing I take away from that movie is the relationship I have with the guys almost 40 years on.

One of the more famous stories surrounding The Warriors is that you actually got a call from Ronald Reagan once the movie had been released. How true is that?

Yes .

You talked about how you’d gotten your start with stage productions and with Madman. Obviously The Warriors projected you to a whole new level of fame and celebrity, so how did you find having to deal with that new attention and was that particularly surreal to experience?

Yeah, I think so. I think it probably is for most people in this field when they have a movie or television programme or play or whatever that takes them from obscurity to a place where they’re recognisable, at least by a certain section of the population who’ve seen that work. The Warriors certainly opened the doors for me to have what career I had. It was the inciting incident, as they say. But yeah, it was the first major motion picture that I’d done and it was a picture that people in Hollywood – behind the scenes, producers, etc – had a lot of buzz over before it was released. It was exciting but at the same time kind of “Oh, okay, this is it. Let’s see how this rollercoaster ride goes.”

 

You mention there that there was a lot of buzz behind the scenes in Hollywood before the movie came out, but was there any particular moment with yourselves on set where you realised you had something special or did that not hit home until the film was released?

I would say it was more the latter. I think when we were doing the picture we were having fun but we were slogging away making this movie. I’m sure we all hoped it would be successful, but I had done one picture, Madman, James Remar had done one picture called On the Yard. So we were the most experienced actors on the set. Everybody else, it was pretty much their first go around – so we were just thrilled to be working. We were thrilled to go from the unemployment line, from getting a dole cheque, to getting a salary. I think we all harbored hopes, “Paramount’s producing this thing. Maybe it’ll be a hit movie. Maybe it’ll get me some traction to get somewhere in this business.” I can’t speak for everyone else, but for myself I don’t think there was a defining moment during the making of the movie where I thought, “Yeah, this is gonna be a hit movie.” I didn’t really know enough about movies and the making of movies to make that determination. I would not hesitate to say I doubt that Walter Hill and Larry Gordon knew that this movie would become the cult classic movie that it’s become. How do you figure that when you’re making a movie? They may have thought that it had a chance to make some money at the box office, but to transcend generations of people over 40 years who love this movie is crazy. I don’t think anybody saw that.

The film itself seems like the perfect storm for that point in time, but it wasn’t without its controversy upon release due to the negative press garnered by real-life gang battles at some screenings. In fact, some stories claim that there were even some deaths at screenings due to rival gangs fighting. Do you think that the infamy and attention caused by that helped create a must-see feel to the movie for some audiences and added to the publicity?

You know, I really don’t know. The Warriors was a low budget movie, even for 1978 when we made it. It was an under $5 million picture, which is not a lot of money to spend on a picture even then. For whatever reason, the opening weekend – mid February in 1979 – it was the box office champ in the States. It took the box office! And then the incidents… and they’ve been overblown. There were not riots in the streets. I think there were two major incidents; one on the East coast; one in California where two rival factions had gone to see the movie at the same time and had an altercation. In each case a gang member was killed, which is awful. At that time the press jumped all over it, and it was blaming this incendiary movie for causing two rival factions to go armed to see it. I think they were already pre-disposed to do that. That’s not justifying The Warriors – by any standards of today it would be a pretty tame movie. I’ve even heard that Paramount over the years have admitted that they may have been a little hasty in pulling the film. But that’s what they did. Within 3 weeks of that movie opening, it was not playing anywhere. All the publicity had been pulled on it. So, long-winded version of “Did that add to the mystique that helped make this movie a cult classic movie?”, I don’t see how it could not have to some degree. But I don’t know, because actually the first that I heard it was getting some kind of cult recognition was I had a friend who had been in Paris in the early ‘80s – I’m gonna say ’83 to ’85, somewhere in that time, which is 4 or 5 years after The Warriors originally screened – and I was living in California at the time, but when he got back, he said “You’re not gonna believe this. The Warriors, I was in Paris and it was like Rocky Horror Picture Show. There’s people lining up outside, people dressed up like the characters.” So that was the first thing, and in Paris of all places! That was the first I had heard of any kind of movement with the movie after its initial release. I don’t know how much it’s original controversy played into that, but that’s a good question. I’ve never been asked that, whether specifically the notoriety played into its cult status. I don’t know, it may have or not.

How familiar were you with the gang culture of New York at that point in time?

Well I lived in Manhattan. After I left the UK to come back to the States in ’76, I lived in Manhattan from ’76 to ’82. So when we did The Warriors in ’78, I’d been in Manhattan for a couple of years at that point. Most of the gang activity was not in the area where I lived. When I did move up to the Upper West Side and lived on West 79th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, on West 82nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam there was a gang. I’d walk down that block just in walking around my neighbourhood, and you’d see these kids outside this brownstone and it was pretty obvious. They weren’t dressed in any kind of colours like you saw in The Warriors, it may have tended more towards the Orphans than anything, but it was pretty obvious who they were. If you talk to David Harris who played Cochise, David grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And Dorsey Wright (The Warriors’ Cleon) grew up in Brooklyn. So they grew up with, and were very aware of, the gang culture in the city. In 1978, it was way different than now. New York got cleaned up considerably when Giuliani was Mayor. Time Square now is Disneyland. Then it was hookers and drug dealers and you name it. When we were making that movie, one block over was certainly a very dangerous and risqué area. We were aware of it, but I didn’t live in a part of town where I was ever threatened by gangs.

 

Were you ever privy to any gang action on set at all? Countless rumours have circulated over the decades about how certain local gangs took umbrage with someone making a film about gangs…

Yeah, there were a couple of incidents but they were certainly not to the degree that they’ve grown in mythology. I can’t remember where we were shooting, whether it was Brooklyn or The Bronx, where a local gang was upset. You know, between setups and things we’d stay close to set but you might be walking down the street or whatever, and we just kept our little vest on. And they got upset, whoever the local gang was in the area, and they made it known to the location scout or the production manager that they were not happy, even though we were actors and not real gang members, for us wearing those colours on their turf. So they insisted that when we were not shooting, we’d not walk around wearing our vest – which we obliged. We just took off our vests in between takes. And I’m guessing that they simply didn’t get the pay-off, because usually wherever we shot, whether it was a gang or the mafia or whoever controlled that area, somebody got paid. That’s the way movies get made usually to ensure that everything was gonna be copacetic. Another instance that probably sticks out in my memory more than anything is we went to an area in The Bronx one night to shoot just a running shot. It was just gonna be a shot of the Warriors walking down a wet-down street as a travelling shot that would’ve taken probably less than a second or two in the movie. Why Walter wanted that location was that on both sides of the street were these derelict buildings. It looked like Dresden after World War II. The window frames just looked like they were bombed-out buildings down this one block on both sides of the street. They were just empty, vacated, rundown, derelict. It was a pretty cool visual for us just walking down this street and the camera sees on both sides of the street these derelict buildings. So we get set up for the shot, the streets get wet down. Right as they call “Action!” and the Warriors are trooping down this street, these previously empty windows on both side of the streets fill with these young gang kids yelling and screaming. And they wouldn’t quit, so we just packed up our stuff and moved on. It was just kind of a wasted half a night of shooting. That always sticks out because I really found it quite ironic and amusing at the time. These kids wouldn’t let us make this shot, and it was pretty funny. But I don’t remember really any scenes where local gangs caused any kind of threat to us or to anyone involved, and I’m sure that has grown into mythology that there was that. I mean, there may have been that and I was unaware of it, but I can’t recall any personal threat. I should probably be saying everything you’ve heard did actually go on – we had a rumble!

The film was a huge launching pad for yourself, but in the aftermath of The Warriors did you find yourself a little pigeonholed in the roles you were offered after people had seen how great you were as Swan?

Initially, not at all, because the next thing I did after The Warriors was an American television movie, a Thanksgiving special with Anthony Hopkins. It was about the voyage of the Mayflower, I played John Alden complete with the Devon accent. So that was totally different from Swan. Here’s this lovesick guy on this ship sailing across in the 1500s. And the next thing I did after that was Xanadu, which was a totally different kind of thing. So no, it didn’t pigeonhole me. Now further down the line I did get offered some similar kinds of action-oriented roles which may have come from people knowing me from The Warriors.

There’s a classic quote out there from yourself along the lines of The Warriors opened so many doors for you, then Xanadu closed those doors completely…

I did say that. I didn’t put the completely on there, but I think what I said was, “The Warriors opened the doors for me, and Xanadu slammed them shut.” You know, I look back on that and I’ve certainly changed my feelings on that movie a little over time because at these conventions that I’ve gone to over the years there’s been a sizeable contingent of fans that love Xanadu. Depending on how old they were when they saw it, it really spoke to them in a kind of life-affirming way that they could follow their dreams and do what they wanted to do. I’ve had people come and testify to me with, “I saw Xanadu when I was 13 years old and I became an artist because of that, and that’s what I do today.” And this guy’s in his 40s or whatever. So that’s made me have a greater appreciation for the movie than I did initially. Larry Gordon, who produced The Warriors, produced Xanadu along with Joel Silver, and I think they had looked at everyone at the right age in Hollywood and not found someone, so they contacted my agent and sent me a script. I was working, actually, on Mayflower. I had a script sent to the location where I was, and I read it, and I thought “You know, I’m not a song and dance musical kind of guy. This is just really not my wheelhouse of acting.” All actors want to think they can do everything, and we always want to do song and dance. I can carry a tune, but it’s really better left in the shower. Fortunately I didn’t have to sing, at the end of the day. I’m not a dancer, I can move okay but I’m not a dancer. It’s kind of a romantic comedy, so I just really thought this is not what is really my strong suit, though it might be appealing to do from a character point of view. So I passed on that movie twice. I didn’t think, because of those reasons, that it would further my career because I didn’t have enough confidence that this was the best casting choice for me. But then they came back a third time and I think the offer financially, I bought my first house in California from it. You kind of go, “Well, now this has become an economic issue rather than an artistic one.” I was about to get married, because Cari and I got married in September right after that movie opened, so I took the film. And I enjoyed the process of making the movie, I certainly enjoyed meeting and working with Olivia . She is just an unbelievably gracious, down-to-earth person. She’s everything all her fans hope she is! Gene Kelly, I’m sitting there pinching myself on a director’s chair in Malibu going, “I grew up on a farm in Arkansas, and I’m sitting here with one of my heroes.” Singin’ in the Rain is one of my favourite movies, I loved that movie. He was just a Prince of a person. I was on location, I lived in New York at the time, the filming went through the Thanksgiving holiday season, and Gene Kelly, knowing I was just there staying in a hotel and doing the movie, he invited me to his family’s Thanksgiving. I ended up not going because my sister and her family lived in Southern California and she had previously invited me, but I always thought “How nice and gracious is that, that a man who’s a Hollywood legend asked you to go and have Thanksgiving with his family?” I still have lifelong friends from doing Xanadu, but I still think in my own mind that I was miscast, and the film itself, it just suffered – during the making of it, probably four or five writers were hired and fired for reams of rewrites. It’s hard to make a movie when you reshoot things that you did last week and they’re totally different, so you’re trying to figure it out. It was difficult from the production point of view for me. When it opened, it bombed, it just failed at the box office. I think there were high expectations for it, but it too has become, on a lesser scale, a cult movie. Who knew? So I did say probably somewhere in the early ‘80s that The Warriors opened the door for me and Xanadu slammed it shut. That’s a long-winded answer!

 

Given the nature of our very own publication, we love to cover the horror genre. You got to work with Wes Craven on Chiller in 1985, and while yourself and The Warriors have a certain place in cult history, so too does Wes. How was it working with him?

I think he’d done the first Nightmare prior to that. It was delightful working with him. Having been a college professor, he was very articulate. I loved talking to him, he was very gentle spirited, a very caring man. It was a pleasure working with him. That’s the only horror movie for me. I’ve done other work that even though it’s not a horror movie, it is a horror movie because I play monsters in them, but they wouldn’t be in that genre. The reason that I took that movie besides Wes Craven directing it was I just thought, “This is going to be challenging to play. How can you play a person who has clinically died, been frozen, 10 years later is brought back from death because now science has found what they can do to heal his body from whatever killed him, but you come back without a soul?” I just found that spiritually, philosophically and metaphysically an interesting question. I wanted to look at how I was going to play that. So that was intriguing to me in taking that role on. There were some others involved – Beatrice Straight, Paul Sorvino – who were very, very good actors. I had a good time doing that movie. But because it was a made-for-television movie in the States, it doesn’t have wide viewership even in America but certainly not around the world. People go, “Wes Craven did this? How do I get it?” Like most made-for-television movies, at least in the States in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, they aired once, they might bring them back 6 months later or a year later and air them again just to get all of their cost and profit out of it, but then they just go to the vault.

Moving back to The Warriors, 2015 gave us The Last Subway Ride Home. What was that like to go back to Coney Island and see the lasting legacy of The Warriors?

That was really quite an experience, to go back to that particular event. We had done an event around the time that the 25th anniversary of the movie happened. We did a thing with an outfit called Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, which at that time was in Austin, Texas. It partnered with Netflix and did a thing in New York that ended up being in Coney Island for a screening of the movie on a big inflatable, portable screen. That was our first kind of reunion where it was just a Warriors event, as oppose to several of us going to a convention where there are all kinds of other franchises. That was the only experience we had had of just a Warriors event, so this thing in 2015 happened probably 10 years later. It was a 1-day event, and 8,000 people showed up at Coney Island to see The Warriors. I was humbled and astounded that that many people showed up, and it was a blazing hot day in September. They stood in line for hours just to come by and shake our hand, getting an autograph or a picture. At a lot of the conventions you go to, there’s a slot of time where you can have a brief conversation with someone. This was sign, “Thank you so much”, then the next person was there because that line was constant all day long. I was simply astounded at how many people loved this movie. I knew it from going to conventions, but it was 1 day of showing us. They came out 8,000 strong to see us! That’s a pretty humbling deal. People came from Australia, the UK. It was amazing to me that people came from foreign countries to be part of this event. It was quite something. We’re doing really the same thing in Birmingham at Edgbaston – it’s Warriors only. So I’m really looking forward to seeing all of our UK fans. I’m hoping that they will show up for this because it’s really just for them that we’re coming over there. It should be a cool event, and we’re really looking forward to it.

 

There’s been talk over the years of a remake or a TV series of The Warriors. Do you think that The Warriors could be made today, or do you think it’s too different a time, that the pieces aren’t in the right places these days?

Everybody would be armed, wouldn’t they? And they would have cell phones. Unless you did it in some dystopian futuristic place, how would you have this gang running for their lives to get home? I mean, you could do it in some sort of vehicle and as a bang-bang shoot-em-up kind of thing – that’s done all the time. To have the kind of innocence that The Warriors had, I don’t see how you can recreate that in the present time. The last viable rumour was when Tony Scott was still living. He, for several years, wanted to do a remake and set it in Southern California and cast it with hip hop stars and rappers, and just turn it into a different thing. Which may well have been a wonderful movie, I have no idea, but it would not have spoken to the same people because, to me, you are talking about New York and how it resonates to people. New York of that time and era is a main character in that movie. I find The Warriors to be a quintessential New York movie in the same way that Mean Streets or Taxi Driver is. You recognise the city and the city is an integral part of it. So to make it somewhere else, and that’s not to say that it couldn’t be done and couldn’t be done well and couldn’t tell that story in a respectful way, but it wouldn’t be the same. Remakes rarely are. I’ve never been a huge fan of remakes, though I did like the Coen Brothers’ True Grit better than the original. I’m a Duke Bridges was good, too. But remakes? There are tons of remake. The Ben-Hur that we love most, the Charlton Heston one, was a remake. So you can’t argue and say all remakes are crappy – they’re not!

And before we wrap things up, is there anything else you’d like to add or share with our readers?

Just that the cast is excited to be coming to the UK, and we look forward to meeting all of the people who love this movie. So please come on out and see us.

The Warriors UK Conclave event takes place at Edgbaston Stadium, Birmingham on April 1st and 2nd. For full details, head to www.ukconclave.com.

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Nick Moran is a British actor, writer, producer and director who came to prominence in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Since then he has carved out a successful career both in front of and behind the camera, and this month stars in the supernatural thriller Don’t Knock Twice. Nick took some time out to talk to Starburst about IMDB, growing up watching horror films and not directing Miss Marple.

Starburst: Hello Nick, how are you?

Nick Moran: I’m alright, thanks. I love your magazine. You’re very thorough and on a couple of my films you’ve given some good reviews. You can talk to me all day!

We may do that! You’re an incredibly busy actor so we wondered what drew you specifically to Don’t Knock Twice?

I tend to be attached to many things on IMDB that just aren’t real. If you’ve got a little bit of a media profile and you’re quite affable it just happens, and people stick you on their films. Tends to be stuff with a load of page 3 models or something. IMDB could never be a key witness for the defence! Bless ‘em, but I’ve given up with them. I don’t even look at it now. If you can order the film on Amazon then I’m definitely in that one. I haven’t done as many supernatural thrillers or horror films as I would have liked though – let’s just get the word out there – and talking of that, Caradog had done The Machine and I was really impressed with that. It was a high concept film that really worked and was the forerunner to Ex Machina. When the opportunity came up to work with the guys who made The Machine then I was in. This film is a well-timed, jump out of your skin, John Carpenter-style thriller and I really enjoyed it when I saw it. Not the sort of Eli Roth blood and guts fest. I’m proud to be part of it. To answer your question, I thought it was going to be good and it was.

There’s a hidden gravitas to your character.

What you have to do with these films, is that every now and then you have a straight line or point that draws you back into the reality of the story. When stuff that stretches belief happens, then you’re already there. For me, the reality is the key. Nothing supernatural happens when I’m around, but then maybe it does. You don’t get what’s really going on until much later. It follows all the films that my mother used to love; the classic horrors and the stuff I was brought up on. My Dad used to work nights and on Saturday’s I’d sit up till whatever hour in the morning watching a horror double bill with my Mum and then have nightmares.

Do you think those memories of growing up watching things you shouldn’t is what draws people to horror?

I think that’s right. Those films were on BBC or ITV on Friday and Saturday nights at the scariest time of the week and you don’t really have that now. We had to watch them at those times, you know – go round Kevin’s house because he’s got a DVD player and you haven’t, and watch a pirate copy of Driller Killer. You’d then get scared shitless and have to walk home in the dark. And then maybe Halloween on VHS. Those things are something you shared and were rites of passage, and maybe they’re not too scary now, but they always took something that was based in real life. Those things, those urban legend horror stories, you need a little bit of that for it to work. Then it’s believable. And that’s something you’re hooked into and what I liked about Don’t Knock Twice is that it’s structured like those films. You play knock, knock on a witch’s door, of course she’s gonna come and get you. Anyone who grew up in the ‘80s knows that! That’s the law! It’s as sound as anything Newton came out with.

You’ve said in the past that directing is your passion, and yet you’ve only directed a few films.

I got as far as I could go as a director. One thing I learned is that you get lied to as an actor, but as a director you get lied to much, much more. I’ve been attached to at least six films that started to go forward but never happened. Right now, I’m attached to two that look like they might happen. I had a five-year hiatus where nothing happened. That’s why you might not hear from a director for a while. In the interim I’ve written four films and one got made which I couldn’t direct, but a couple are in different stages of development. I’m very lucky in that I don’t have to direct something I don’t like, or something ridiculously low-budget, or even Miss Marple like Windy , and then try and get the world to take me seriously. As an actor I can be in some great films. I will direct again, and hopefully next time we talk, it will be about something I’ve made.

Don’t Knock Twice is Out Now in Cinemas and On Demand and is Released on DVD on the 3rd April

For his directorial debut, Sean Brosnan has produced a dark, twisted tale centred around a wildly dysfunctional relationship between a father and son. Starring Gary Stretch as malevolent patriarch Ivan and Joe Andersen as the mute Asher, My Father Die is a genre-crossing, bloody story of revenge. Sean took some time out to sit down with us to discuss his inspiration for the film, almost casting Mickey Rourke and tells us what it’s really like being a director.

Starburst: What was it about the idea and story of My Father Die that made you think this could be your debut feature as director?

Sean Brosnan: A lot of people were saying that your first feature should always be one you’ve given a great deal of thought to, but I find that if I think too much about it, I might never get started. I literally just thought I wanted to write something that would get in people’s faces, and I’d been watching a lot of Gaspar Noé’s films, and Chun-wook Park’s revenge trilogy. Just a lot of messed up, brutal movies, and I kind of just wanted to do something like that. There’s a play I’ve always loved called The Playboy Of The Western World by J. M. Synge, an Irish play, which I loosely used for the three-act structure. There’s a father-son dynamic but I adapted it. I thought about where I could set it in America and really just bastardised it and twisted it around, probably really upsetting a dead author. I’m really proud of My Father Die, and its doing well, so now there’s a pressure to follow it up with something similar. Just really have to follow your gut.

You have an extreme love/hate relationship at the centre of film. Was that drawn from the play?

The play is more of a dark comedy. With My Father Die, Ivan is so, so bad that he almost wants his son to kill him to prove he’s his son. I really had a lot of fun with Ivan, and I love Gary Stretch (who plays the character).

Gary has said that he believes there is a little Ivan in all of us, which is a scary thought, but that playing the character was freeing as an actor; getting into the mindset of someone written to excess.

To be honest, writing Asher was more of a challenge as he doesn’t speak. With Ivan, I knew that everyone he interacts with he’s going to rape, maim or kill, you know – he’s just a savage. There was stuff we filmed that became too camp as Gary and I were having too much fun with Ivan. In one scene, where he’s banging this hooker, instead of a woman we were going to have a transgender person and we talked about casting Mickey Rourke to do it, but sadly it fell through. I just thought it would be so funny as it would be the ugliest transgender person ever. Gary is so good at playing the antagonist and he has such an interesting, weather-beaten face.

You mentioned Asher there, and Joe Anderson is hugely impressive in the role. Was it a challenge to direct someone playing a mute character?

At the time Joe was filming the television show Hannibal and the first time I actually met him was when he showed up on set. I knew his body of work, though, and in the conversations we’d had by phone he was really passionate about the script. With directing, I tend to work differently with every actor anyway. I started trying to explain what I wanted from Joe and he said “Just tell me what you fucking want.” And that was it! I told him, and he got it. Everyone’s different, it’s like herding cats in a way.

You worked on genre films as an actor, and My Father Die spans several. Is that where you’re drawn when looking at projects or writing?

It’s kind of just how it worked out. With My Father Die, it’s going down well with horror fans but I never really sort it as a horror film. There’s elements in there, sure. Someone wrote once that it was an exploitation movie so I guess it’s a weird, sub-genre of that.

It’s a very stylised film visually and we wondered if that was in the writing from the beginning or something you came to in production?

Using black and white was always going to be the case, and the painting breaks were experimentation and maybe they worked, maybe they didn’t. That was during the editing process. I always liked Rubens Saturn Devouring His Son, but in short, everything that was on screen was in the script. I know it wasn’t a slight metaphor and I wasn’t trying to be subtle! (laughs)

Do you see your career being primarily behind the camera now?

Yeah, I think so. I’m attached to some television projects for later this year but I can’t really talk about them yet. I’m definitely more comfortable. With acting you do your scenes and go home. With writing and directing it’s just more of a head fuck. It keeps me busy and out of trouble.

Comedians Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have spent the last 25 years collecting old videotapes. Since 2004 they’ve been exhibiting some of the more bizarre, hilarious footage they’ve come across. Their cult shows have seen them appear at the likes of the HBO Comedy Festival, Just For Laughs, as well as occasional TV appearances on the likes of Jimmy Kimmel Live and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. This March sees them embark on their latest UK tour. STARBURST spoke to Nick about what audiences can expect:

STARBURST: How would you describe your show for the uninitiated?

Nick Prueher: It’s a live guided tour through our VHS collection. My pal Joe and I have been finding unintentionally hilarious videos at thrift stores since the early ‘90s, so we serve up our favourites, telling the stories behind them and providing a running commentary of jokes and observations. This year’s UK tour is all newly unearthed VHS stuff.

You do regular TV appearances in the States. Is that a fair reflection of what people can expect from your live shows?

On TV we have to keep it pretty tame, whereas our live show features a lot of footage that can’t be shown on television, and some would argue shouldn’t be shown in public either. Mind you, there’s nothing pornographic, but it’s a handful of clips you won’t be able to un-see. A ferret giving birth, for example. Is that going to sell some tickets?

Are you making any changes to your tour for the U.K.?

I believe this is our sixth UK tour and we look forward to it every year. We usually don’t have to make too many changes when we go to England and Scotland but occasionally we’ll find that certain celebrities didn’t make it across the pond. It’s like how most Americans have no idea who Robbie Williams is, we discovered that Pee-Herman never really hit it big in the UK. He’s sort of our Mr. Bean but when we referenced him in London we were met with stunned silence. That said, everyone loves to laugh at Americans so the show is universal.

How did you originally get into this?

Like most good ideas, it was born out of complete boredom. Joe and I grew up in a small town in the Midwest and would entertain ourselves by going to local thrift stores and finding interesting items. In the ‘90s people starting dumping their old VHS tapes en masse at these places and we would scoop them up–exercise videos, how-to tapes, training videos, home movies–and then screen them for friends in our parents’ basements. In 2004, we had enough tapes that we decided to take it out of living rooms and dorm rooms and do it in a proper theatre. But it still very much feels like we’re in our parents’ basements.

What’s the greatest video you’ve ever found?

This changes from year-to-year but right now I’d say it’s the North Dakota News footage. We were doing a show in Fargo, North Dakota last year and met a guy afterwards who was an editor at their local news station for almost 20 years. He said the only thing that kept him going that long were the bloopers. Someone would mess up on live TV and he would be there to save the footage and preserve for the ages. Luckily, he entrusted us to be the keepers of the flame. We cut together our favourite on-air fuck-ups and it brings me to tears every time.

Have you got any videos you’d love to use, but can’t for whatever reason?

We really don’t hold anything back when it comes to what we’ll show. Decency is not a qualifier that enters into our decision-making. That said, if the footage is more disturbing than funny then we are not interested.

One example that comes to mind is the Steve Vai Fan Video. Steve Vai is a guitar god for many people and somehow this tape that a female fan sent him made the rounds on the tape trading circuit. In it, this lady is looking directly at the camera and talking to Steve to wish him a happy birthday. She proceeds to go various “stunts” in which she makes crazy sounds and even blows out candles with an orifice other than her mouth. And it’s weird and goofy but the woman clearly has a few screws loose. It ends up being just kind of sad. So the Steve Vai Fan Video remains on the cutting room floor but the ferret birth made the cut!

Have you ever had any real-life encounters with any of the subjects in your videos? If so, how did it go?

Definitely, we always try to track down the real life behind in the videos because we become fascinated by them. We’ve even gone so far as to hire a private detective to find some of these people. Probably our most famous encounter was with Jack Rebney, a man we dubbed the “World’s Angriest R.V. Salesman.” His story and his meeting with us is chronicled in the documentary, “Winnebago Man,” which is on Netflix and other places now. For this show, we actually tracked down a TV commercial pitchman whose real name was Ben Dover. You’ll have to see the show to find out what happened there.

Why should people come and see your show?

In an age where almost anything you want to see can be pulled up instantly on your phone, this is all footage you can’t see anywhere else, including on our own website. We like to recreate the good ol’ days when friends would gather around in somebody’s living room and say “you’ve got to see this!” And there’s something unique and maybe even cathartic about watching all this footage that was never meant to be seen in public projected on a big screen in a dark cinema. Plus, there’s the aforementioned ferret birth.

You can find out more about the Found Footage Festival at http://www.foundfootagefest.com and see the guys live in the UK on the following dates:

23rd March – Liverpool – Picturehouse @ FACT

24th March – Manchester – The Zoo

25th March – Leeds – Hyde Park Picture House

27th March – Birmingham – Electric Cinema

28th March – Nottingham – Broadway Cinema

29th March – Bristol – Cube Cinema

30th Match – London – Soho Theatre

Cruel Summer is a harrowing, troubling real-world story of lies, jealousy, revenge and dreadful, sickening violence. Filmed in and around Cardiff in August 2015 the film is the tale of a young autistic boy named Danny (Richard Pawulski) whose overnight camping adventure, part of his Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme, turns into a terrifying nightmare when he becomes the target of a campaign of hate led by the furious, enraged Nicholas (Emmerdale star Danny Miller). Nicholas and his sidekicks Calvin (Reece Douglas) and Julia (Natalie Martins) scour the city for Richard and when they finally find him, the horror begins…  As Cruel Summer arrives on DVD and VOD, STARBURST sits down for a chat with Phillip Escott and Craig Newman, the film’s Cardiff-born director/writers…

STARBURST: Can you give us a broad idea of the core concept behind the film?

Phillip Escott: I guess it’s a day in the life of a bunch of British teenagers that takes a drastic turn depending on which side of the film you’re on. There are the disenfranchised youths and then there’s Danny who is the embodiment of everything that is good and proper about youth and British life. They have a rather climactic and tragic encounter towards the end of the film.

Cruel Summer is a hard film to classify. Is it a thriller, a horror film, some hybrid of the two or something else entirely?

Craig Newman: I guess it’s more a thriller but based on the sort of tension that’s built up throughout the film and the ending itself and the events that take place at the end it sorts of tips into the horror genre based on the brutal, realistic, horrific nature of the events themselves. You could describe it as a horror thriller.

PE: We came up with the phrase ‘real-life horror’ where the horror comes from the reality of the situation because it’s inspired by real events so it’s a very dramatic piece for sure but it does tip into horror…

You say it’s inspired by real events but is it based on one specific incident or an amalgam of various incidents?

PE: It’s really from a collection of incidents. Back in 2012-13, there was a whole lot of knife crime as you’re probably aware yourself. There were a number of stories, one from Sheffield in 2004, which haunted Craig considerably in which a mentally-challenged boy went camping with some friends and they tortured him for two days and there was another one which really got to me where in Liverpool a bunch of pre-teens were bullied by an older boy and I think they were bullied into setting fire to a homeless man. That really caught me because that could happen to any of us, we can all get caught up in someone’s manipulation and that’s what was terrifying.

 

How did you go about shaping your real-life inspiration into the idea for a film script?

We were at the point where we decided we wanted to write a feature film script and wanted to make a feature film. It was just our enthusiasm. I remember one day saying ‘we need to make a feature film’ as we’d made a bunch of shorts and worked on various projects so it was pure adrenaline and enthusiasm. Phil wrote the first draft very quickly, we threw around a few ideas and before we knew it we had a workable draft in a couple of months. I think it was our enthusiasm and determination and the idea we had that we thought was so strong that allowed us to just crack on.

PE: I literally just sat down and banged out a draft and sent it to Craig and then it was to and fro with this works, this doesn’t work, rewrite, this works, this doesn’t work, rewrite. It was very organic really, and quite quick, I think it took us about three months all in all.

And you financed the ten-day shoot entirely on your own?

CN: We’d read interviews and articles about how some really very good low-budget British feature films had been made for very low money, Down Terrace (2009) by Ben Wheatley being one example, and we just thought if they can do it on that amount of money then so can we. It was pure naïvety on our part. We thought ‘Well if it cost Ben Wheatley that much to make a film, we’ve got that much money, let’s do it’ and that was it. We basically learned as we went along.

Stepping back to your early days, what influenced you both into becoming involved in film-making?

PE: Like Craig I’ve always been a big film fan, a big buff, but I’m from Ely in Cardiff which isn’t exactly a place known for its rich glamourous people and there’s certainly no film industry. It was always a case of wanting to do something but not having any inroads into the industry. My high school didn’t have a media course so I was like ‘How do I get into films?’ and that shut me down at a young age but that passion for film carried on into my twenties. I went to university and started doing a scriptwriting course and that’s where I got the bug; Russell Gascoigne, a great writer who did A Touch of Frost amongst other stuff was my lecturer, and he saw what I was doing on the page and got behind it and that gave me the impetus to carry on with it. Craig and I were friends outside of film, we had the same interests in music and film and we watched a tonne of horror films and other films and it just grew from there really. That was and around 2004/5. Years and years of watching a lot of films before thinking ‘Let’s actually do it!’

CN: I remember the exact moment we came up with the idea of starting to make films. Basically every Friday and Saturday we’d go to Phil’s apartment in Cardiff Bay and we’d have these film marathons where we’d watch three films in a night. We’d have a theme – horror night, drama night, whatever. I dare anyone to have the film collection Phil has, I’ve never seen anybody with a DVD collection like it. It’s like going into a video shop, it was awesome. We’d watch these films and one day, my brother brought over his iPhone which had this app which had a filter you could put over anything you filmed to make it look like grindhouse, a bit like Planet Terror. I remember seeing it and just thinking – up to that point I’d always thought that making films was expensive and impossible to do – well, there’s no excuse now not to really make one because you can film it on a phone and put this filter on that makes it look like a proper film. So we shot our first proper short on this iPhone with the filter on top. We had no sound, we didn’t know anything about editing software or anything but it was that pure adrenalin until we upgraded to a Canon 50D because a film we liked called Rubber (2010) was shot on one of these 50D DLSRs and it looked great. So we thought if we got one of those cameras we could make a film like that too. We got the cheapest DLSR you can get and we shot the film on the 550 and from that point onwards we were constantly learning about the camera. All we really knew was that the frame rate had to be 24 frames per second, we didn’t know anything about shutter speed or ISO, white balance, lighting… but we kept on with every film until we eventually got to the point where we had that ‘sit down’ conversation and said we needed to make a feature film, we needed to stop making these shorts films and here we are today.

 

Talk us through the casting process. It’s a bit of a coup to snag a major British soap star (Danny Miller) for your first feature…

PE: That was sheer good fortune really. We hired Reece to play Calvin and he was friends with Danny through their charity football thing. Danny had just stopped doing Emmerdale for a while and he’d just come off Lightfields so for all intents and purposes, he was unemployed. So we said ‘Can you come down to Wales for ten days and shoot this film for very little money?’ and he agreed – more fool him! He got the material, he liked what we were doing. It was one of those blessings that you can’t plan for. He connected with it and he knows, from his background, the kind of people we were trying to write. He said ‘I know exactly what you’re trying to do here, I know these sorts of people, I get it, and I’m on board.’ He brought his ‘A’ game and he was just dynamite realty.

Presumably, the rest of the cast reacted in the same way?

CN: The truth is, even if you’re from a middle-class background, somewhere in your life you’re going to come into contact with people from all different cultures so we’ve all encountered people who are somewhat aggressive or manipulative or aggressive, whether it’s in High School or outside of that environment or in your relationship with your partner; all three of us here have been faced with an aggressive person who’s been aggressive towards us for no reason at all or who has become aggressive for some reason that has been blown out of all proportion. I think everyone can relate to that, whether it’s the audience or the actors so I think that’s why all the cast took to it so well. Natalie, we hired through auditions and she was the first video audition we got and it ended up being the best one we received, we kept on going back to that first audition no matter how many others we received.

The pivotal role of Danny must have been the hardest to cast and Richard Pawulski’s performance is extraordinary. How did you find him?

CN: Danny was the really difficult one. We’d hired the main principle cast – Natalie, Danny and Reece – but we were struggling to find someone to play the part of Danny in the film. It was getting quite close to the bone, we were getting close to shooting and we still hadn’t found somebody who we felt could do it. Richard got in touch and he had researched people with autism and special needs for a little project he had done and he contacted us to say he had experience with this. He sent us a demo reel with him performing and it was just mind-blowing. We were like ‘that’s the guy’; sometimes things just fall into place.

You must have encountered a few practical problems on a tight ten-day shooting schedule…

CN: Well, it rained on the fifth day! Obviously, the film’s called Cruel Summer so the environment we were going for needed to be sunny. But we actually shot it during a heatwave apart from a couple of occasions where we got rained off on day five and the climactic chase scene where Julia and Reece are chasing Danny through the woods where it was too dark and wet so it was unworkable. There were a couple of grey spots but mostly we got really lucky with the weather. When we decided we were going to make a film we said ‘Right, when are we gonna shoot it’ so we went online and found what, statistically, were the driest months in the UK and it said August so we shot mid/end August but also it was important that it was dry and very light because, to save money, we knew we weren’t going to be able to use any form of artificial lighting, we were just going to use natural lighting. Good camera plus natural lighting equals usable imagery!

Was there much opportunities for the cast to have any input into their roles or the arcs of their characters?

PE: Lots! We blocked out two days before shooting in which Craig and the crew and the cast went through the script with a fine-tooth comb as I was out doing location recces because we still didn’t have woods, which was the biggest part of the film and we didn’t have a location for it!

CN: Because we set ourselves the goal in January to make a film that same year we didn’t get any notes from any outside sources. We just thought it was good because we’d done it. By March, we had what we considered to be a final draft and in August we were shooting. Two days before shooting, I got the cast and we did a read-through and they were picking out plot holes or flaws in the characters and they brought to the table some great ideas to improve the script and just two days before shooting and during that rehearsal period, I went back and did some rewrites and threw in some of their suggestions and luckily having that two-day period meant that while we were shooting we were able to make improvements and make sure that some of the character’s arcs were more developed, the ending was more effective. It was all just collaboration at the end of the day with me, Phil, the actors just talking it through. Ideally, that would have been done before but we didn’t really use our development period to do that so unfortunately it came really late and it worked.

What was the atmosphere like when you came to film the really disturbing stuff towards the end of the film?

PE: Everyone was remarkably laid back really. It never felt extreme. I guess we’d all read the script so we knew what was happening. It wasn’t as challenging as I guess you’d expect it to be which is just as well otherwise it’d have been quite horrible to get through. It probably helps when you’re battling wind elements and you’re filming this horrible scene where they’re tormenting Danny and stripping him and suddenly the gazebo everyone’s in gets blown off into the lake and Craig runs in, strips off and tries to save the gazebo! There’s little happy instances like that that serve to break the trauma!

CN: I guess that maybe on a bigger budget film you’ve got time to focus on the intensity of the script but when you’re multi-tasking like me, Phil and everybody else you’re filming this very intense scene but then you’re wondering what the sound is going to be like, are we going to be able to use this sound or maybe something’s not quite right, some prop isn’t working so although you are focusing on the performances there are so many other things that are going on around you that it doesn’t impair your mood, if you like, because you’re doing a job, you’re working. It’s not like you’re shooting this dark, solemn scene so everyone feels dark and moody; you’ve got a job to do so you just do your job.

PE: It goes back to that old horror movie thing where people say ‘How could you make a horror film with all that blood and gore and gruesome violence?’ and you say ‘Well, it’s just a lot of fun to make!’

The film made its debut at FrightFest last August. How did that come about?

PE: As soon as it was done, I sent it to FrightFest because that was pretty much Goal No. 1 for us because if there’s anywhere we were hoping our film would get shown it was FrightFest because we love it and we respect what they do and we thought it’d be the perfect film for them. Luckily for us, they selected us but the downside was we then had to sit on it for eight months. It was accepted by FrightFest in December but that meant we couldn’t do anything for eight months because it was going to be a World Premiere so we couldn’t put it on DVD, we couldn’t do anything except just sit on it and wait, which was a bit of a learning curve in itself really!

CN: We did a Q&A there where we had our first challenging experience from an audience where the first question was from an individual from the crowd who said they didn’t believe it belonged in a festival like FrightFest which celebrates horror and the fun of horror. I guess they were wanting zombies and guts being torn out but because it wasn’t your atypical horror film, I think the point they were trying to make for some reason was that maybe it belonged in a more drama-driven festival.

PE: I think they had a point but we always saw this as a cheap man’s Eden Lake – we didn’t have the sort of money Eden Lake had – and that’s where the FrightFest programmer jumped in and said ‘Well I think it’s the perfect film for FrightFest, we don’t have just one definition of what horror is, it can be many different things and much as Eden Lake is a real-life horrific situation it very much fits in with the manifesto of FrightFest’ and we then got massive applause from the audience!

Looking back then, what would you say you have taken and learned from the experience of making Cruel Summer?

PE: It’s like a world apart now. We know so much more now because we’ve got through every facet of film with this, from pre-production to distribution and we’ve covered everything and we know everything. Going back to when we put pen to paper to what we know now is just incredible. We could write a book. It’s just huge.

CN: To a certain extent, we were sort of self-taught in the art of not just filmmaking itself but the business element. We had some support from people who were helping us out along the way but what was a good thing was that we were left to learn. We’d get a bit of information and then we’d have to go away and teach ourselves how to do that particular element and how to steer our way through all the shit, basically. But I’m grateful for it now. There were times during it when it was so hard that you almost wanted to give up. There were definitely times when I thought ‘Is it really worth all this bullshit?’ but you get through it, you learn and you reach the point now where it’s coming out although you hated it at times, looking back on it, you realise you learned a lot from that horrible experience! But all in all, it’s been one massive learning experience, as if we’ve been to some sort of school, been taught, had to go through the lectures and sit the exams but it was all of our own doing.

Cruel Summer is available now on DVD and VOD.

A church in Holborn, Central London would seem to be a contrasting choice to what was about to be unleashed on an invited group of press, but Sofia-based games developer Heamimont Games, with help from Motörhead’s Phil Campbell and Troma President Lloyd Kaufman, with support from good old Toxie aka The Toxic Avenger were out in force to unleash a special preview of their games Victor Vran Overkill Edition and Motörhead – Through the Ages, which are linked together and are being released across several platforms in PC, PS4 and XBOX One versions. The attendees were given the chance to play the game in various versions and amidst a buffet of food and drink, plus the official Motörhead beer, ‘Road Crew’ (brewed by Camerons) and a JD and coke special in honour of the late Motörhead leader Lemmy, Starburst were delighted to speak with both Lloyd and Phil about the game and their respective careers.

INTERVIEW WITH LLOYD KAUFMAN 

Starburst: Two films you worked on behind the scenes, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, are celebrating 40 years. What are your fondest memories of working on those and did you think they were going to create such a lasting legacy?

Lloyd Kaufman: Well, they were my film school and I learned a lot of what I did from John G. Avildsen and John Badham. In fact, on the official Troma YouTube movie channel, you can watch John G’s movie Cry Uncle, which was a Troma Film and Joe, which was Peter Boyle and Susan Sarandon’s first film, was directed by John as well which I did. I knew Rocky was going to do well, because John was a great director and so was John Badham. I actually have a part in Fever as the driver for Tony’s brother Frankie when he leaves the house. I can’t be seen in the TV version, but on the DVD and Theatrical, you can (the scene is just after the bridge sequence when Tony and co. dare to climb the girders). If you have a great director, you will have a great movie.

Troma continues to be such a key brand in independent cinema. The Toxic Avenger remains such an iconic character amongst fans and cultists. If Disney came along and offered you a substantial amount of money to buy the Troma library so they could make a whole host of reboots (i.e. a Michael Bay-ish version of The Toxic Avenger), lets say $4.1B like they did with a certain Mr. Lucas, given what you have successfully created on your own terms, would you take the money?

Of course – everyone has their price. Indeed, James Gunn, who started with us at Troma, actually wrote Guardians of the Galaxy, a great movie that I enjoyed and he is now Disney through and through.

You are very straight talking when it comes to filmmaking and in your book Direct Your Own Damn Movie!, you talk of Martin Scorsese inspiring a ‘tsunami of pretentious, look at me film school filmmakers’. However, overall, given what does succeed in the business, are there any filmmakers you admire from that background and context that have created something of significance?

Well, Scorsese is the one example I cite. When we were mixing Tromeo & Juliet, we did it at night at the same place where Scorsese was mixing during the day because we got a discount and at night, the Dom Perignon champagne was left around with a lot of bottles half open, so we’d drink it!!!

 

You worked for Cannon as well at one point. Given what became of the company eventually, which lessons or observations did you learn and mak from working for them?

Cannon was where I met John G. Avildsen and they produced Joe. The most valuable lesson I learned was never to quit. I had to deliver a tape to tape recorder to some writer on Staten Island and said to him, I don’t want to do this. He told me there and then to quit and go for it. Joe was turned into a great movie by John who made it for $150,000.

Your fellow classmates whilst at Yale were Oliver Stone and George W. Bush, two very political figures in both filmmaking and office. Do you have a particular Oliver Stone favourite film?

Well, Oliver and I started out together. He used to hang around the set of a film we made called Super Cookies, which was a lesbian version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and we also grew up together before we attended Yale.

If you could hypothetically pick an A-list cast for a Troma film, which film would you do and who would you have as, say, Toxic Avenger or Sgt. Kabukiman?

I am an auteur director and it is always about the director. I am not interested in stars too much, although a lot of talent has come out of the Troma world like Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Samuel L. Jackson’s first film was with us, Def by Temptation (although I didn’t do it myself). I also like Emma Stone as well. I have Toxie 5 in script form, but haven’t done it yet because I don’t have the money, but if I did do it, I would cast a wrestler called Dolph Ziggler in the role, he is a very talented actor. 

Finally, can we expect Donald Trump to get the Troma-tically lampooning experience soon. It was said that Toxie was a spokesman for world peace. Is there a script in the works that is going to give Trump a proper send-up?

In my new film Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High – Volume 2, there are some Donald Trump references in there (Lemmy plays the President of the USA in his last role before his sad death recently).  

INTERVIEW WITH PHIL CAMPBELL

Starburst: Motörhead were such an integral part of musical culture and we are here at this launch to celebrate the release of a new game around the band. When you were touring with Lemmy and co in the 1980s, did you relax with video games between gigs etc. back then and what were your favourites, if any?

Phil Campbell: From around the 1990s I used to play them at home and Lemmy would always be playing them between writing lyrics and other things. Lemmy used to play all sorts. I think he played Star Wars as well.

Did you let your children play video games, or were you strict to get them to focus on education and so on?

Yes, they loved them, although back in the day they were very expensive – about £40.

Motörhead – Through the Ages is another opportunity to celebrate the legacy of the band. Was the concept of the game your idea or did you collaborate with others in the genesis?

Well, the company initially asked us to supply music for the games and a lot of the guys who developed the game were already Motörhead fans, so effectively we sat together to create a game. There’s a lot of history and crazy stories – we’ve done everything. Overall, I am very proud of it.

Technology has played an increasing part in how music is created and performed, particularly during concerts when LCD displays and huge screens are all part of the appeal for concertgoers. Were Motörhead very aware of this during their time, or were they more of a purist group in terms of live performance?

It was always 100% about the music. We would often vary it a bit where we were and based on what we could afford, but it was always about the music.

Your group The Bastard Sons obviously must give you a lot of personal satisfaction post-Motörhead. How does the dynamic of the music and group differ from the earlier band?

It’s good, all my three sons are in it and Neil Stones is the singer. We started it about four years ago and produced an EP of songs. We played mostly festivals and started with cover songs, but we are planning to do a full album this year. It is a party band and we play a lot of obscure Motörhead as well as the likes of “Ace of Spades” and “Kill by Death”.

Guitar Hero is a game that has kind of diluted the potential of real guitar playing. As a hobby guitarist of over 30 years myself I played it and it isn’t the same as the real thing. What do you think of that game generally in terms of it’s success and potential and has it influenced people to take up the guitar?

Well, we offered eight songs to Guitar Hero and a bunch of new songs as well. The funny thing is when I play Guitar Hero, I use my little finger more than I do when I play a real guitar (laughs). Also, I failed on the Guitar Hero “Ace of Spades” after about 20 seconds (laughs).
Finally, what are you most proud of musically and what is your favourite guitar and why?

I think the fact that we played together for forty years. Every gig was special. In terms of my favourite guitar, my wife bought me for our anniversary five years ago an original Les Paul Custom from 1957, a black with rare alnico pick-ups and a Bigsky tremolo. I used to have about 400 guitars, a lot of which I have given away to charity, but I still have about 100 in my possession and 30 of which are classic. 

Doctor Who spin-off Faction Paradox turns twenty this year. Blair Bidmead, the author of the novel that coincides with the anniversary, talks about his book Weapons Grade Snake Oil, and about the Faction Paradox themselves.

STARBURST: What is the Faction Paradox?

Blair Bidmead: Faction Paradox is a nefarious, criminal, time-travelling, voodoo death cult, who first appeared, twenty years ago, in several Doctor Who books, but have since diverged into their own series of novels.

Their first appearance was in the book Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles. A sort of counter-culture sect, founded by a heretical Time Lord known as “Grandfather Paradox”, the Faction sneer at old-fashioned ideas of non-interference with the prescribed course of history. Always twisting events to their own advantage, usually from behind the scenes. They are similar to the Bavarian Illuminati of pop-culture conspiracy theory. Being as they exist throughout all history, their stories can happen anywhere, at any time and focus on any set of protagonists. This broad canvass has encouraged a diversity to the Faction Paradox novels, and also goes some way to explaining why there is still such an interest in them, twenty years on.

How has the idea evolved?

Faction Paradox was written out of the ongoing Doctor Who books series and Lawrence Miles felt that there were more stories to tell with the concept. He launched the first Faction Paradox range, with Mad Norwegian Press, and wrote the initial book in that series, This Town Will Never Let Us Go. Over the years, the brand has moved between publishers, and currently resides with Obverse Books. Given the nature of the subject, there is a tendency to have the Faction themselves slightly tangential to the stories that bear their name. On this occasion, Obverse was very keen to have them front and centre in my novel. Weapons Grade Snake Oil has a large chunk of the story set within Faction Paradox’s home, the Eleven Day Empire, a shadowy alternate London that exists outside space and time. I’ve explored new areas of the Empire and revealed previously unmentioned branches of the organisation. The overall plot involves the drawing together of a band of disparate, antagonistic individuals, from across history, in order to stage a daring heist. There are nods to Faction stories of the past, and if you know your Doctor Who, there may also be the odd allusion to things you might not have expected. That said, you don’t need to know anything about either franchise to follow and enjoy the story.

So how did you get involved?

I had already written a short story in the anthology, Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts a few years ago. It was called Now or Thereabouts and it revolved around the initiation of new recruits. The main character was a young woman from contemporary London, called Ceol. Weapons Grade Snake Oil is an ensemble piece, but the woman who was once called Ceol has since escaped the Faction, faked her own death and created a new identity for herself. She’s now called Sojourner. She’s in her fifties, a grandmother and an inspirational political leader on Pluto, in the far future. Just as everything for her is utterly perfect, the Faction reappears in her life and force her to come back for “one more job.”

And was it an honour to be asked to write the twentieth-anniversary novel?

It’s amazing. My first exposure to Faction Paradox was the Doctor Who book The Taking of Planet 5 by Mark Clapham and Simon Bucher-Jones. This was around the turn of the millennium. I was a bit of a lapsed Who-book reader at the time, I hadn’t read one for years. But that novel blew me away. I was so drawn to the ideas in that story, especially the Faction themselves, it dragged me back in. I tracked down all the previous books I’d missed and devoured them. Now, all this time later, to be able to add my link to the chain, it’s an incredible honour. There are a couple of other Faction Paradox books to be published, during this anniversary year though. Dale Smith’s novel, Spinning Jenny is imminent, and the aforementioned Simon Bucher-Jones is editing a new anthology. It’s a great time to get involved with all things paradoxical. 

Weapons Grade Snake Oil is available from http://obversebooks.co.uk/product/wgso/.

Caradog W. James is a British filmmaker who impressed audiences with 2013’s festival hit The Machine. The style and craft James demonstrated on that film has carried through into his first foray into the horror genre, Don’t Knock Twice. Based on an urban myth, Don’t Knock Twice is as visually striking as it is creepy, and confirms James as a director to watch…

STARBURST: It’s been a couple of years since Starburst spoke with you about The Machine; how have you been?

Caradog W. James: Great, thank you. It’s funny, we’ve finally been green lit on the pilot for the television series so we’ll be filming in Toronto soon.

That’s great news.

Yeah, I pitched the television series to Universal and SyFy a couple of years ago, and they commissioned me to write a script, and I’ve been writing and re-writing while making Don’t Knock Twice. It’s great because they’ve given us a decent budget to get going with.

The timing appears to be perfect as since you made The Machine we’ve had Ex Machina and Westworld, but you were there first.

(laughs) I was! The only problem was we didn’t have a marketing budget so no-one knew we were the first!

We should talk about Don’t Knock Twice though. How were the challenges different with this film?

It’s another low budget film so you never have enough time or resources, which is always a challenge, but with a fantastic cast and crew we’ve pulled it together. The hardest thing is always getting the film to be the vision you want within those constraints and on schedule.

Do you feel that with horror there are certain things fans and audiences expect and that you need to include while remaining original?

The reason I wanted to make a horror film, in truth, was to become a better filmmaker. I’m not an aficionado but I did set out to watch hundreds in anticipation of making Don’t Knock Twice. It’s all about eliciting a response from the audience, provoking fear and tension through sound and camera movements. In many ways, horror films are looked down upon because they’re genre but you can learn so much from making them. They’re deceptively difficult to get right and I can see why some filmmakers spend their entire career in the genre. And once you’ve done it you immediately feel like you could have done it better. So, it wasn’t so much about satisfying anyone else’s expectations, just me improving as a filmmaker and I believe horror to be wonderful school for that.

Of those hundreds of films you watched were there any that influenced Don’t Knock Twice?

John Carpenter is certainly a massive influence; The Exorcist is obviously a benchmark and Kubrick’s The Shining. These are the films that transcend the genre into art and that’s always what you aspire for. In terms of trying to understand what works, there were the ones I always went back to. The Blumhouse model is a good one, but they’re not always great films. The Conjuring, however, is a perfect example of modern horror with great direction and script, demonstrating great craft.

You mention The Conjuring, and that is a film that absolutely does hit the right horror notes in targeting a mass audience.

One hundred percent, but those clichés will always be there, it’s just a craft to design the film well to make sure, when you do hit them, they work.

Back to Don’t Knock Twice, you have a “creature”. How do you set about the design process as there are so many already on film?

For me, I’m invariably disappointed with monsters. My approach, it was about trying to keep the monster hidden as much as possible as fear builds in the imagination. And equally, if you can have a real person playing the monster it’s far more effective than CGI.

There is a kitchen scene that is extremely effective but, like you say, very little is seen.

I love that scene because I was able to do the same lighting as in Blade Runner, with the reflections and so on.

You have the same theme of dysfunctional parental care in Don’t Knock Twice as you did in The Machine, but you didn’t write this one. How did you incorporate that?

I fed back into the script and we re-jigged the main character a little. When you work on a film for a year and a half things do change and it’s a theme that is very close to my heart; about sacrifice and the conflict between providing for you family and being there for them. I find it important and very relatable.

Caradog, thank you for your time today.

Good to chat with you, thank you.

Following the runaway success of his appearance in 2014’s The LEGO Movie, Batman has landed a brick-centric movie of his very own. But can his ego take the strain? STARBURST sat down with The LEGO Batman Movie’s director Chris McKay and producer Dan Lin to talk big laughs, legal wrangling and microwaved lobsters…

STARBURST: Was there ever any doubt that Batman would be the next subject for a LEGO movie?

Dan Lin: Well, we started off thinking about making a LEGO movie sequel but then we thought no, let’s broaden our storytelling universe and tell a story from a different genre. The first movie tackled the adventure genre, now we’re doing the superhero genre, next we’ll do a martial arts movie! So we’ve shaken it up, but the actual LEGO Movie sequel will be along in Feb 2019.

Talking of broadening things out, you seem to have every movie and TV bad guy or monster ever in this movie – including King Kong, Dracula and the Daleks…

Chris McKay: Yeah, that’s the way kids play – it’s certainly how I used to play – to mash up all these characters. But also, it made sense for a lot of reasons in terms of the Joker’s plan this time where he’s really upping his game.

How difficult was it from a legal standpoint to get clearance for so many other franchise characters to appear in this new movie?

DL: Well, there was a lot of goodwill. People really enjoyed the first movie and saw we respected their characters. They realised these were LEGO takes on their characters; with Voldemort for example, it’s not Ralph Fiennes’ version if Voldemort from the Harry Potter movies, it’s Eddie Izzard’s version.

CM: And going into the rogue’s gallery and pulling characters from the Frank Miller version or the Animated Series, we had to get the lawyers involved. We wanted to go right back into the old school stuff and have characters like Gentleman Ghost which meant we had to go and find the representatives of the writer on that particular comic book. So even going into the Batman universe itself, there was a lot of legal wrangling.

Chris, as Animation Director on The LEGO Movie, you had a lot of people fooled into thinking they were seeing real stop-motion as opposed to CGI. How do you feel about the question of CGI ‘authenticity’?

CM: When I’m asking an animator to emulate stop motion, it’s not just a computer algorithm, it is an animator making those choices. So even if he or she doesn’t have their hands directly on a mini figure on a table top under hot lights, they are still making moment-by-moment story decisions across each frame for everything that goes on in that frame. As to whether it’s as “authentic” as stop motion or not, I feel like it is because I know the hard work that goes into both because I worked with stop motion on TV for years (on the Robot Chicken series).

Some of this film’s biggest laughs arise from the smaller comic touches such as when we see Batman heating up lobster in the microwave or the silent shot of the Joker’s dejected face scrunching up in anguish. Was it tough to get the balance right with these low-key touches?

CM: Yeah, especially as those moments you singled out are purely visual storytelling things. The decision to hold a shot like that one of the Joker’s face is a visual decision that will work in any language. But to get it right, yeah it’s tough because you’re also up against story concerns and arcs. We had a lot of characters in this movie and we were trying to fulfil all the different relationships,

DL: What I love about it that it’s really bold filmmaking. As a producer, you notice that a shot like Batman cooking his lobster in the microwave has no sound. You’re leaning on the emotion and the joke. It’s a very bold, quiet moment. But if the joke doesn’t work, that’s a thud! Most people are bold by going loud or over the top, Chris is going in the opposite direction to what people expect; instead of going over the top he gives you something quiet and more realistic.

Dan, with the success of the LEGO movies, these are exciting times for the Warner Animation Group. How’s the future shaping up?

DL: My ambition is to continue making fresh, bold movies – not just from previous mythologies but to tell original stories. But expect the same ethos as in the way we attack these LEGO movies. For us, quality is of the utmost importance, we work and work and work these movies to death. When you see a LEGO movie you know what you’re getting, a very irreverent tone but with a lot of heart.

The Lego Batman Movie is in cinemas from February 10th